A Thought Concerning the Images and Language Indispensable to the Destruction That is War

From Jim Boushay and Rickey Sain

· Warriors, fight, attack, slay, sword, kill, battlefield, army, confrontation, wipe out, obliterate, militant, mobilize, clash, contend, dog fight, battle cry, soldier, maim, an offensive, call to arms, besiege…and all the horrid rest of the words and terminology of war.


But the words above are used to characterize the efforts to bring peace. Even superficially paying attention to what’s happening reveals that.

We live in contradiction.

More than a year ago we co-wrote a series of letters to religious leaders around the world, asking why is it that the so-called bringers of peace find it necessary to engage the rhetoric of war and battle. Many thoughtful (and profoundly unsettling) responses came back—a book’s in fact. This morning in town over breakfast at the Pancake House, we met with an ordained clergy member. This executives secular job is to lead and organize and empower a new religion initiative, which is statewide and perhaps national in its planned civic and political impact. He was seeking support. Shockingly to us, he said, “We’re thankfully in the process of blowing away those bastards.”

Christiane Amanpour’s three part CNN prime-time series last Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (last night)—titled God’s Warriors—covered our culture’s global predicament at the extremes of religion and religious expression. It’s too easy—and grossly incorrect—to say the predicament is between the clearly secular and the profoundly sacred, although surely it is that. It is much more. Listen carefully to the rhetoric and the metaphors: Our culture is readying for global war. God help us, have mercy on us. When religious leaders across the spectrum cannot keep from routinely using the brutal language of fight and attack when talking of bringing peace, then for us two there is much less hope for an “enduring” peace. Under the circumstances described here, peace is ever illusory, near impossible.

If you get a chance, read The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation by Richard Gamble. He details how the language of “progressivism” led to World War I, the war that was supposed to end all wars but which led to all to the other wars since. When will we learn? He describes how the attitudes and actions of the progressive Christian clergy in 1910-1918 played a major role in drawing the U.S. into a world at war. That situation sounds much like the attitudes and violent language of the religious leaders of today in their clever and tragic recommendations for so-called “applied Christianity.”

Historically in our messianic “religious” nation, says Gamble, the real meaning of “applied Christianity” is conveyed in use of the rhetoric of crusades, of a suffering God as victim and as disempowered, rather than as omnipotent and all-loving. Talk about a global crisis of faith!

Professor Gamble shows how the progressive, mainstream Protestant clergy in the late 19th Century and especially the first decade of the 20th Century provided—in the pulpit and their writings—the images and the language indispensable to waging the destruction that is war. And here we are doing pretty much the same thing 100 years later. Do we learn from history? Right now the answer seems to be: hardly.

The ones talking of and really meaning peace are being drowned out apparently by the louder voices of those using the battle cry language of attack and fight. With the nation at war Abraham Lincoln told us something important concerning those who say God is on their side in the conflict. He reminded Americans that less do we need to state that God is on "our" side. More do we need to ask if we are on God's side.

Thanks, Rachel, for asking and for listening here. Good luck Sunday. You’ll have to give a mighty sermon in that mighty Presbyterian church. Break a leg! Oops. I guess we really do live in contradiction.